


Sollux Captor, Accidental Revolutionist

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternia, Brooding Caverns, Child Death, Gore, Grubs, Hacking, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Revenge, Torture, because everything Alternian can probably kill you and eat your heart, gaming the system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-05 23:57:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1836862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which, inexplicably, Sollux Captor is put in a position of responsibility. And there are grubs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sollux Captor, Accidental Revolutionist

Simply put, strong psionics did not have bright futures in the Alternian Empire, unless by bright, you mean an endless opportunity to face burnout for the glory of the empress in schlepping around a large tin can packed with a variety pack of cannon fodder and douches. Yet that doesn’t mean that Sollux Captor intended a revolution. As brilliant a mind as he has, examining the future, specifically, his future, was a practice he took pains to avoid.

If there had been a movie adaption, it might have been titled, _In Which a Yellow Blood of Highest Will and Mind Overthrows The Empire In 353 Modest but Practical Steps…._ If the revolution had failed, and the Empress’s Propaganderists had produced it, It might have been called _In Which a Yellow Blood Rebels Against His Rightful Service And Is Put In His Place As Another Engine of The Empire…._ Both might have been subtitled with the body count and relative interpretation of morality. As it happens, both such productions would have been factually inaccurate.

Sollux never intended to be the nail that stuck up and got hammered down. His failings, of which there were many, merely assured that when one Karkat Vantas had stated “THE LIKELYHOOD OF YOUR MISERABLE CARCASS’S SUCCESS IS LOWER THAN A LOADGAPER BUG SUCCESSFULLY BACKPADDLING THE NORTH OCEAN. IN CLEAR TERMS: NO WAY. YOU CAN’T”, the conclusion was already a forgone one.

If the empire had been aware of Karkat’s existence as more than a rust file number, he would have been destroyed by anyone acting in the interest of the empire as genetically undesirable. If anyone old enough to remember certain sections of history, before they were banned under the Things-That-Definitely-Never-Happened category, they might have labeled him a threat due to potential cult uprising. Neither category of troll would likely have guessed that the greatest danger Karkat would offer the empire started its sally into empire-threatening as, essentially, NEENER, NEENER, NEENER.

Several incidents thusly followed.

There was the drone delivery system. Sollux tiptoed in and arranged a conflict in flight stabilization and navigation programming. The drone dumped its load and returned to base for maintenance. The fancy computer components, previously destined for a blueblood on the shore, served more creative use in a hybrid bee system. The system wiped the incident and the original owner grumbled a bit about the delay, but the empire, while miserly with the lowbloods, hand-waved a great deal of excess and waste among the highbloods, and no attempt was made to salvage the original load.

Briefly, Sollux considered trying the same with a construction drone, specifically, there were a few annoyances that could use a load of bricks on their pans, but that could be construed as blatant black solicitation, and, if there was one thing Sollux avoided whenever possible, it was self-examination. The results were never pretty, and, after several rescues, his moirail had forbidden him to try unsupervised.

There were the on-planet networks, with separate sections for different sweeps’ wrigglers, and a few intriguing remnants of adult organizations which should have been just remnants, but were just a bit too well-maintained. There were pirates, cultists of several denominations, all forbidden, and a black-market for anything that a departing conscript might wish to offload for currency still valid in adulthood. There was also the mostly insular Jade blood network and archives. It was there that Sollux found distraction for several perigees.

At first, he just observed. There were cameras all over the Mothergrub caverns, and, while they should have been inaccessible to the outside, the network was old, the jadebloods still needed access to the requisition systems, and there was some limited hookup to the space fleet. This was more than sufficient to act as a welcoming mat for a skilled hacker who was also an insomniac in search of something to kill time.

In the caverns, the Mothergrubs were huge and strangely ethereal, glowing and topped with comically tiny wings. He wondered if they could ever fly or if was just a punchline, like the rest of Alternia. He found footage, both live, and archived, of the seething mass of grubs, hatching, fighting, eating, crapping, and, strangely, sometimes huddled together in small groups, or determinately galumphing after some of the attendants. At first, they all looked the same to him, the groups of similarly dressed and comported jadebloods and the masses of grubs both, but after binging on archived footage, he started to recognize some of the attendants and got used to the body language and vocalizations that the grubs used in place of practical typing or talking. And that’s when he made his first mistake.

Aradia had been away for two perigees, during which he had become used to a new schedule: wake up, troll some forums, troll Karkat, block Karkat, hack back into the cavern networks to peep at the cavern to fleet traffic, laugh at the ongoing lives and drama and absentmindedly log potential blackmail, and simultaneously stream current footage of grubs being stupid. Sometimes he varied this schedule by eating something.

It was strangely fascinating to watch tiny faces and tiny legs attempt to conquer the walls, the large carcasses the jadebloods provided, and each other. He had saved the clip of one mellow greenblood rolling off a ledge. The surprised face. The frantic yelp. The pillbug impression. The cautious uncurling. The full body shake. The considering look. The excited butt wiggle as the grub climbed back up the wall… and repeatedly fell off again.

Every wriggler knew that adults were bad news. If Sollux had been prone to more unsupervised self-examination, he might have wondered how creepy it was for a wriggler halfway to adulthood to be watching grubs in turn, but, fortunately he was inclined to avoid the “should I” track of thought in favor of “just don’t get caught”. In this vein, one possible universe, in which LOLgrubs became huge in the fleet and some unfortunate grubs were raised as pets until they were no longer stupidly cute, was not to be. This is fortunate as CuteGrubButt Blogs have never been anything but a frivolous phantom of perverted minds. And yet. Sollux might not have shared the clip, but the time had done its damage, and he found himself bemusedly tuning in nightly to see the next update.

The first mistake was getting attached. It was swiftly followed by the inevitable, getting his bloodpusher ripped up. Two perigees was not a lot of time for an adolescent troll, but developmentally it was huge for the grubs. He had started watching this batch just after they hatched, and in that time, they had doubled in size and speed, and halved each other twice in number. Most of the deaths were not immediate. Some eggs had never hatched. Some grubs didn’t get enough to eat, others just inexplicitly failed to wake at night. There were injuries that didn’t heal. And when a grub lay still long enough, and failed to protest enough, the survivors let nothing go to waste. That hadn’t bothered him. Really it hadn’t. Until one of his favorites, (he didn’t have favorites, he really didn’t) was culled, and his traitorous mind (always working even if it was just to undermine him) demanded to know WHY.

The tiny purple, all four grublegs and curling carapaced tail, lambent gray eyes, and bright toothy grin, spangled all over with tiny freckles that glowed in the darker areas of the cavern… There had been the mellow green, and the sparky fearless maroon that reminded him of Aradia, the calm jadeblood that the attendants snuck treats, and the violet, easygoing and happy, the antithesis of all the highblooded douches he’d had the misfortune of encountering in person (rarely), or who’d had the misfortune of encountering him online (hehehe).

It had been without warning, as many forms of Alternian doom were, when an attendant has swooped in, plucked up the tiny form, and gracefully strode off without stepping on any grubs or slipping in any grubmesses. The violet wiggled, but settled, trustingly. Half the planet away, Sollux recognized the attendant, felt his digestive sack plummet, and followed her form through the caverns back to her room, where she pulled out a scroll of sea troll anatomy, pinned the tiny squirming form to a tray with one hand, and sliced open the first layer of abdominal chitin. The tiny form screamed and flailed and she put the scalpel down, pinned the legs and tail with sharp needles, and picked the scalpel back up again. The torture went on until the screaming was just hoarse panting, the tray was full of blood and liquid, and finally, the grub, eyes long since closed, went limp. The attendant calmly washed her hands, opened the registration system, entered “unsuitable personality” under cullable defect for grub number V3-23,589, year class 24,158 and opened a search for “how to prepare freshly slaughtered grub steak, subclass V3 seadweller”.

 *

Sollux wakes up in the ablution block, reeking of vomit, head pounding. He can hear Biclopsdad roaring on the roof. The walls are covered in starbursts of char, but no actual structural damage. He pulls himself up the load gaper, leans under the tap, and drinks until his stomach aches with the chill. Every time he shuts his eyes he can see it again, so he feeds dad and plays mindless online games, and drinks red and blue Grubplosion until he vomits purple, but he doesn’t close his eyes. Karkat pesters him, he blocks him, he unblocks him, and blocks him again. He doesn’t see the escalating threats, but he hears the knock on his door. He wonders if it’s the drones. If they know. Unsuitable personality. Unstable psionic. If only they did know.

It’s not the drones. It’s not Karkat. It’s Karkat pulling out the big ballistic propelling devices. Aradia unlocks the door while he hunches undecided. She sweeps in, locks the door, paps him so hard it might be considered a slap, then pulls him into her. Resting a cheek on her fatty chestsacks, head carefully angled to avoid gouging her, he closes his eyes voluntarily for the first time in three nights, and if some ocular lubrication slips out, who’s to know?

There’s an uncomfortable feelings pile. He tries to explain that he’s not really attached. He tries to explain that he didn’t mean to get attached. Aradia dissects his feelings with him. He can’t resent it. He wonders how she stand to clean up all his messes. She asks him what he felt for the grub, (needlessly dying on a tray, summarized in the vast Alternian system as “unsuitable personality” … it’s wrong. It’s WRONG. IT’S WRONG. Why?).

Out of the stream of words for emotions, sympathy, grief, anger… pity is wrong, but he can’t find a better one. He’s not a grubfucker. He doesn’t, didn’t, want to sex up a tiny bundle of thin-skinned muscle and organs, bones still mobile in their cartilaginous traces. He is pale for AA like no other. He’d never cheat. He vomits again. Aradia holds the water glass, holds the washrag, holds his pieces all ready to shiver apart, shushes him.

She tells him that his feelings aren’t wrong. She asks him how he feels about the attendant. (He hates her. It’s platonic. He still wants to be there when she dies, painfully.) When he can’t talk any more, she tells him about her digs. She spins stories that may or may not have happened from potshards and metal remnants and wall painting and holes in the ground. She tells him stories of cults and cultures that lived, and may yet live, before the empress, or hidden yet from her gaze.

There are lusus tales of trolls raising grubs, knowing your ancestors the way you might your neighbors, feelings, not red, or black, or gray, or pale, just belonging, clade, outside of the quadrants. He listens with dry eyes and runny nose and thinks that she looks more like a queen in her dirt encrusted skirts, steady voice, and the strong lines of her neck, and nose, and horns, and gaze, then anyone else ever could. He is pathetically grateful. He is tired of thinking.

She puts him in his ‘coon and he falls asleep, finally, to the soft stroke of her hand in his hair, the strong reverberation of her chirr.

In the evening, two evenings later, she mercilessly makes him pick apart his feelings again. He tries to explain how he got so caught up in a place he has no business in. He shows her the mellow green, perpetually falling off the wall, laughing, starting again. She wheedles out a few other clips he’s saved, small slumbering multicolored piles, the sly sleight of hand that most of the jadebloods use to sneak their favorites vitamin chew sticks and pretend they haven’t. He explains that some of them grubnap their favorites back to their blocks for “experiments” that just mean patching up and feeding until they’re less likely to end up another’s snack. He finds a clip he forgot, the tiny V23589, freckles and eyes aglow, pouncing on a passing jadeblood’s boot, gnawing on a lace, cheerfully rolling over for the adult’s clawed digits to tickle its soft underbelly. He wonders if this attendant will notice it’s gone. He can’t bring himself to delete the clip.

At this point, the delivery drone drop off and being in places he shouldn’t is the extent of Sollux Captor’s crimes. At this point it is Aradia, mudblood, adventuress, fearless thinker of thoughts that should go unspoken, that asks, “What are we going to do?”

They start subtly. They agree that he will check his ideas with her before embarking on any new ways to funk things up. He might feel like he’s only hitting his stride on day two of a coding binge, but Aradia can differentiate the thin line between brilliant and dehydrated and slightly sparky. She asks “How are the caverns are ruled, are the rules enforced, how? How much do they communicate out to the Fleet? How much is coming back from the Fleet?” It never would have occurred to him to look at it this way. The empress is in charge. The jadebloods tend the mothergrubs, feed and cull the grubs. In between that, the jadebloods have their own society. And their own rating system. Fortunately for Sollux, the system is partially online. In fact, all the calculations and deciding bits are online. The upper levels of jadeblood management grade the lower levels, and each other, on the questions the system requests, and the system calculates and spits out promotions, demerits, new rules, new vitamin mixes, and the occasional, exceedingly rare, jadeblood culling. He wants to resort to the last, but Aradia counsels discretion. Technically, the jadeblood did no wrong.

That doesn’t mean he won’t mindfuck the system until it’s spitting demerits for her every wrong footfall. Over the next few sweeps, through the advent of several other important projects and the addressing of numerous bits of drama and wrongdoing, two lowbloods reshape the cavern programming and culture. The system may not be directly enforced by the empire but nothing’s truly secret for long and gossip and opinions hold a heavy sway in an insular community with little recourse for direct outside communication or company.

It’s Aradia who asks if the rarity of Jadebloods might be attributed to the fact that, past the initial Drone Sweep, they can only look to one another to fill buckets. There are no concupiscent dispensations between the fleet and the homebound caste. There are few passions, red or black, between the largely levelheaded Jades. It makes them strangely static, and it will be the thread Sollux unravels until the Empire follows.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is a one-shot. I would have loved to see where things went from here, as I'm positive that it would at some point involve Sollux covered in grubs like Eddie Izzard's "heeelp, covered in bees"... but I don't know what that would entail, so, hopbeast, free to a good home.


End file.
